A characteristic feature of economic development is the ever changing structure of consumption patterns. Reducing the explanation of this phenomenon to changing prices, finally caused by changes in the availability of goods (or characteristics), would neglect a major force driving this change,...

The paper unravels the subversive nature of Schumpeter’s proposition that entrepreneurs carry out innovations (the micro level), that swarms of followers imitate them (meso) and that, as a consequence, 'creative destruction’ leads to economic development 'from within’...

An evolutionary perspective on economic behavior has to account for the influences that the human genetic endowment has on the choices the agents make. Likely to have been fixed in times of fierce selection pressure, this endowment is presumably adapted to the living conditions of early humans....

Evolution is thought to occur in many disciplinary domains. Because of the intellectual attraction of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, evolutionary processes in other domains are often conceptualized in terms of that theory. However, as explained, such a heuristic strategy is neither...

How relevant is the notion of evolution for economics? In view of the paradigmatic influence of Darwinian thought, several recently advocated interpretations are discussed first which rely on Darwinian concepts. As an alternative, a notion of evolution is suggested that is based on a few,...

In pursuing profit opportunities, entrepreneurs often use multi-person firms. Since employment contracts leave some discretion to the employees, organizational coherence requires that they are coordinated on the entrepreneurial business conception as their own frame of action. Accordingly, the...

This paper contributes to the Evolutionary Economic Geography literature by employing the conceptualization of Ôrelated varietyÕ to compare the emerging internet industry in ChinaÕs two largest city-regions: Beijing and Shanghai. Official website registration records, Alexa internet traffic...

This article reviews the most important transfers of this kind into evolutionary economics. It broadly differentiates between approaches that draw on an analogy construction to the biological sphere, those that make metaphorical use of Darwinian ideas, and avenues that are based on the fact that...

Following last decadeÕs programmatic papers on Evolutionary Economic Geography, we report on recent empirical advances and how this empirical work can be positioned vis-ˆ-vis other strands of research in economic geography. First, we review studies on the path dependent nature of clustering,...

On the basis of the technical definition of selection developed by George Price (1995), we describe two forms of selection that commonly occur at the social level, subset selection and generative selection. Both forms of selection are abstract and general, and therefore also incomplete; both...